Un Hombre de Modo/A Fashionable Man

Enrique Gomez Carrillo (1895)

This 19th-century newspaper diary was a really fun exercise which, as well as providing an insight into a very specific point in European history, demonstrates the amount of research that is often needed in translation. In order to accurately render both the content and the humorous tone of the piece, I needed to know about the Panama corruption scandal of the 1860s; the structure of the French police at this time; legal terms in early 19th-century France; slang terms for policemen that might have been used in this period; the plot of Balzac’s Lost Illusions; and the classical legend of Jupiter.

The man of the moment is Artón. My readers ought to remember him, because for the last three months of the famous Panama Affair, the newswires persisted in informing the whole world, day after day, that the defenders of justice in France were expecting to find thousands of scandalous documents “in Artón’s suitcase.” And so the aforementioned suitcase rose to global fame, not only for its contents, but for its success in evading capture by the French argousins, the English bobbies and the American gumshoes [1].

For three years, the whereabouts of Artón and of his suitcase was a mystery swathed in contradictions. Night after night, a communiqué from Turkey, or Russia, would inform the Prefecture of Paris that Artón had been sighted, in this city or in that city, but the agents never managed to arrive at the specified location before the suitcase was long gone. An inspector from the uniformed police directorate nevertheless would assure the press that the government knew exactly where “the untraceable” was hiding, and that, when the Minister for Justice was so inclined, nothing would be easier than to seize him. The liberal newspapers called it a “mystery”; the conservative papers called it “calumny”.

The one thing that is certain is that a week after the return to the ministry of Monsieur Ricard, coordinator of the judicial enquiry into the Panama corruption scheme, both Artón and his suitcase had fallen into the hands of the English police.

Legal proceedings in Paris will commence once the judges in London have completed the official extradition process; we will see whether the much-coveted papers of that celebrated suitcase are worth the expense of their recovery.

Do you recall Balzac’s Lost Illusions, and the inventor who fell into ruin? Lucien de Rubempré forges bills of exchange to the sum of three thousand francs at the expense of his family. When the bills arrive from Paris, Lucien’s brother David is not in a position to pay them and sends them back; Lucien, in turn, is unable to, in the legal jargon of the time, “extinguish the protest”[3], and the bills are returned to Rubempré’s old home town of Angoulême, this time not addressed to his family but to a notary. The notary passes them to a judge, the judge sends them to the public prosecutor, the public prosecutor sends them to a lawyer, the lawyer holds on to them for some time… and so when one year later Lucien becomes a favourite of Abbé Carlos Herrera, and wants to pay his debts, he finds that the original bills now amount to a debt of fifteen thousand francs.

To hunt down Artón’s suitcase, the police acted along similar lines. Right at the beginning, Artón “the untraceable” proposed to Monsiour Dupas, superintendent of the uniformed patrol, that if someone were willing to lend him a hundred thousand francs, three days afterwards he would hand himself over to the Parisian authorities. The prefect, naturally, did not even consider giving Artón a penny, but instead began to dispatch agents to London, to Rome, to Christania [2], to Stockholm, to Constantinople, to New York, and so on; with the result that, when Artón finally landed in the clutches of his pursuers eight days ago, the French state had accrued travel and administrative expenses well in excess of one hundred thousand francs.

During his first few years in the world of commerce, Artón visited a number of different countries in South America, and in Rio de Janeiro he was for some time the cleverest employee in the service of those banks with little money but a great deal of business.

After two or three years of Parisian life, Artón’s Brazilian fortune had run dry, but it was of no consequence: those thirty of forty months of luxury were quite enough for an able and energetic man to position himself as one of the most indispensable employees of the Dynamite Trust.

Monsieur de Lesseps found himself in need one day of bankers who would make sure that public opinion, and the opinion of the deputies of the National Assembly, would be sympathetic to his business ventures. Friends referred him to three men: Baron Reinach, who was to commit suicide right at the start of the bribery trial; Cornelio Hertz, who at that point in time lay dying in a foreign port, and Artón.

It was Artón who was assigned the most dangerous part of the whole affair, because not only was he instructed to buy “the lost souls of influential journalists”, but he was also the ambassador shepherding the millions of francs through parliament.

If a representative of the people of France should believe that the Panama Canal would bring ruin to bond subscribers? Well, along would come Artón with his chequebook, eager to put their minds at rest once and for all, to the tune of three hundred thousand francs.

“If I were a holy prophet,” announced that good friend of de Lessep’s during an evening of drunken revelry, “I would turn myself, like Jupiter, into a shower of gold. There is nothing so exquisite as a shower of gold!”

The golden rain of Panama eventually came to an end, and the dynamite business failed to amount to much more than a trickle of silver, in which a fine Parisian gentleman would struggle to swim with even bourgeois respectability.

Two weeks later, the chief inspectors charged with surprising the thief in his bed found nothing in his opulent home on the Rue Godot but one of the prettiest actresses in Paris, who, perhaps, was searching for her missing jewels.

In his last few months of freedom, Artón had created some industrial invention which had allowed him to live in luxury in London, under the pseudonym of Newman [5]. He had invented a new method of packaging tea…

“Mr Newman,” attests the humble grocer, “was a man of genius. He would come here to my shop every day in his carriage, and there was no resisting him; he would induce me to buy tea from him, and he would make me display his advertisements in my windows. In two months, he had got everyone in my guild to ditch our old suppliers and buy everything from his establishment instead…he was a man of genius.”

TRANSLATOR’S NOTES

[1]: The earliest use of the term “gumshoe” to refer to a plain clothes police officer or detective, predominantly in the United States, is actually 1906 – a decade after the publication of this piece. I have included it in my translation as part of a word system replacing the borrowed, exoticising terms policemens [sic] and detectives with slang words in order to preserve the marked effect that the original text would have had on the source-language reader. However, depending on the purpose of the target text, in the interest of historical accuracy the editor may prefer to retain the original detectives.

[2]: Christiania was the name of the city we now know as Oslo between 1624 and 1877, when the spelling was changed to Kristiania. The city’s original Norwegian name, Oslo, was restored in 1925.

[3]: I arrived at this phrase after some research, consulting both legal dictionaries and the original French text. The phrase used in the source text is a Spanish calque of a French phrase used in a specific legal context in the 19th century, and so a direct translation is impossible. However, the author’s intention here is to convey the general meaning (Rubempré was unable to meet the suddenly inflated cost of the original debt) in an amusingly jargon-laden way, which I think my solution achieves.

[4]: This is a slightly puzzling tense shift, which perhaps was intended to convey an informal, conversational style. I have respected it in my translation; however this constitutes an editorial decision which, depending on the purpose of the target text, might be open to debate.

[5]: In English texts which mention Artón, the name “Newman” appears rather than the “Neuman” used in the ST. It is unclear whether the original author made an error or if this was an intentional difference, but I have reverted to the standard “Newman” in my translation.

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